If nuclear attack or civil breakdown ever threatens the United Kingdom, the heads of government and the military know where to go. Beneath the streets of London, deeper than the capital’s famous Tube system, exists a hidden bunker on constant standby.

Replete with blast doors, a broadcast studio and a giant screen resembling CNN’s massive touchscreen wall on The Situation Room, this nuclear safe house sits in wait for the end of the world. Welcome to the Ministry of Defence’s Crisis Command Center, subterranean England.

David Moore’s series The Last Things documents a complex to which no other photographer has ever gained access. According to Moore, the ministry’s official line is that the Crisis Command Center “doesn’t exist,” which is the case inasmuch as the policy of the ministry is not to discuss its facilities.

“I told the Ministry of Defence, ‘I am not a journalist, I am an artist,'” Moore said in a Skype interview. “That was very important. They needed to know I wasn’t doing an exposé.” Although Moore was unable to confirm or deny the fact, it is widely speculated that The Last Things documents the Pindar complex constructed beneath Whitehall in the 1990s.

As of today the facility has only been used for less-grandiose purposes as a communication center and to play out war-game scenarios. One gets the impression that it is an ill-timed response to a Cold War mentality, with its actual utility uncertain.

Prior to beginning the work in 2006, Moore enlisted the help of Angela Weight, former Keeper of Art at the Imperial War Museum in London. Together they lobbied ministry officials. “We had a series of meetings, slowly climbing the hierarchy of authority,” said Moore.

Always accompanied by a low-ranking officer, the photographer had a loose agreement about what he could and could not shoot. It was clear when certain doors were to remain locked.

“At a point, I wondered if I was being sold a lie — if I was being shown things that weren’t actually in operation,” he said. As the project progressed, however, his paranoia waned.

To this day, Moore is not certain why he was granted entry’ He was only told by a ministry official that his work “fell within operational guidelines.” By prior agreement, the ministry received several of Moore’s prints for its permanent art collection, which probably sweetened the deal.

Moore has been led to believe no other freelance photographer will ever gain access to the site, though interestingly, the ministry does employ its own in-house photographers, whose photos are presumably for use in internal reports.

Upon completion of the project, Moore and the Ministry of Defence convened for a censorship panel. No images could be — or have been — released without ministry approval.

“I was asked to digitally manipulate some of the images,” said Moore. “Door numbers [were redacted]. We haggled over descriptions and captions.”

As Weight describes in her afterword to The Last Things, “There was to be no compromise [on captions]; any form of linkage or association, such as the word ‘government’ for example, was firmly denied.”

The negotiations became part of Moore’s process. He came to think of these amendments as things added, not taken away: “I dedicate a page in the book to describing the changes I’ve made. I make it obvious.”

The Last Things continues Moore’s portfolio of works on secret and relevant state infrastructure. “My work is not nostalgic,” says Moore. “My photographs are always of live spaces. The crisis command center is not mothballed.” He’s previously taken a forensic view of the Britain’s Houses of Parliament and has since photographed the top-security jail cells for terrorist suspects inside London’s Paddington Green Police Station (disclosure note: author’s blog).

Moore is currently working on access to other classified sites that remain unnamed.

“My work shows hidden spaces,” he said. “I want to use photography as a democratic tool. Looking at state apparatus and panoptic sites, I see my work as an act of visual democracy.”

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The Last Things, with texts by Chris Petit & Angela Weight is published by Dewi Lewis (2008). It is Moore’s third book.

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